I just read the NY Times. In print. Cover to cover, so to speak, although I skipped the parts that didn’t interest me, which were most of the parts at least beyond the second paragraph. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the experience. I then put my coffee cup in the sink, declared that unit of the day over, and opened my laptop to begin the next.

In a hyperlinked world, boxing off content is unlikely to be a winning strategy. “Here is your morning box of world news, sir. By reading every item in this box, you will be Well Informed, No, sir, for that distinction you need read nothing outside of this box.” Nah.

But, even though my usual morning news reading does not come in a box, it does occur within a stretch of time: Over breakfast on most days I read through feeds I’ve aggregated via Netvibes.com, straying as far out onto the Web as my interests lead me. I stop not when I reach the end of the news, but when I reach the end of coffee.

Obviously, I continue poking around the news (i.e., what is happening in the world) all day long. Nevertheless, I do have a morning news box, defined by time, not by the edges of content.

I suspect that’s because I grew up with morning newspapers and the evening news. I assume that The Kids These Days generally don’t have any sort of box for news. Amiwrong?

Sahara Byrne, from the Dept. of Communication at Cornell U., is giving a Tuesday Berkman lunch, titled “Parent versus Child: Reports of Internet Behaviors and Support for Strategies to Prevent Negative Effects of Online Exposure.”

Sahara looks at strategies to deal with the negative effects of the Net on kids, and how to maximize positive. She’s especially interested in when these strategies go wrong. For example, when do kids resist these strategies?

She begins with the information theory drawing (from Claude Shannon) that depicts a message passing through a channel, interrupted by noise. She’s interested in when we explicitly and deliberately disrupt communication, e.g., by filters, rules, policies.

We adults tend to perceive the Net as raising problems for kids: predators, porn, privacy, peers, and piracy. We have a wide range of strategies. (Last year, the Berkman Center had a conference about the Internet Safety Task Force, convened by attorneys general from 49 states (not Texas). Sahara was there.)

The worst possible strategy: One that the parents love but the kids hate. Whether parents like these strategies depend upon how those strategies match with their values.

Sahara has lots of data, from an Internet survey of 456 parents and matched child pairs (10-17). She asked the parents “How much would you support…” and the kids “How would you feel if your parent…” What individual differences lead people to support different strategies. She also asked what kids were doing on line and what the kids think they’re parents know about what and how much they’re doing on line. “Do the parents have any clue?”

She plots how much parents support a strategy, how much kids do, and the difference. There are few that the kids like more. She looks at various classes of strategies.

Gov’t policy strategies: The site watches what you do; the kids hate that, the parents like it.

There are big gaps in technology strategies as well; e.g., suppose your parents could record everything you do on line. The bigger the difference, the more likely the child will try to get around the strategy.

User/Child Empowerment. Kids and parents like these ideas much better, e.g., ratings, education, peer education about sites. “Kids were not resistant to these because these give them control.”

Parental access. Huge differences. Parents really like having access to all the kids’ passwords, but the kids really really don’t like that.

Co-viewing (i.e., have the computer in a public place in the home). Parents like these. Kids are pretty neutral about this.

Legal ramifications. Kids like the idea of suspending from school other kids who are mean; their parents like it less.

Parenting style predicts agreements and disagreements about how useful they find these strategies. Strict parenting predicts disagreement. Highly communicative styles predicts agreement, except on tech strategies, possibly because those kids are used to being trusted, so having the tech lock them out feels wrong, Sahara says.

The value system also predicts some differences. More conservative parents like gov’t control of the content.

Religion also predicted differences in many of the strategies. The more religious the parents, the less likely the kids were to agree.

So, what might work best? Empowering kids to protect themselves, and (to her surprise) putting more of the onus on gov’t and industry. What’s risk? Kids don’t want to be watched or give away their passwords, especially in authoritarian households.

Sahara now reports on data on what kids actually do online, and what their parents think they do. Kids do their homework, as parents expect. But kids seek personal health info much less than the parents think. And parents overestimate by 100% how much time kids spend on line doing “identity development.” (The question for the kids is “How often do you use the Internet to figure out who you really are?”) Parents unerestimate their kids have been cyberbullied (“been mean to”). They do understand how often they’re upset by an IM. About 50% of kids say that they’ve accidentally come across sexual text or images, while parents think that happens to about 30%. 20% say they’ve looked for sex. 17% of kids say they’ve been approached by a “weird stranger”; parents say 8% of kids have.

Q: What does “weird strangers” mean to the kids? Does it include non-threatening spammers, etc.?
A: [danahboyd] A huge number have encountered strategies, but the fear factor is extremely low. E.g., a sketchy profile in a friend request from a scammer; kids put in the “weird stranger” bucket but they don’t see it as dangerous. The ones kids worry about tend to be weird strangers who repeat.

Q: It looks like on average kids don’t want much protecting.

Q: Of course, to apply this data for deciding on policies, you’d also have to decide how circumventable these strategies are.
A: Yes. I’m interested in the factors that predict support for these strategies.

A: Kids who report it’s easy to talk with their parents are less likely to disagree with their parents about the strategies. It may be that the conversation makes them more similar to their parents.

“If you spend 24 hours a week being a passive participant, consuming tv â€“ as Baby Boomers did â€“ you get a certain sort of brain.” If you spend those hours searching, researching and building connections, you get a very different brain.

Tapscott wants to refute the idea that the internet is making kids dumb. There’s no data to support this, he tells us. Instead, we’re seeing radical societal change, especially around the structure of the family. Kids and parents get along as friends, and sometimes they move back in after graduation. He wonders, “is this the first time in history that we can learn from young people and their new culture of work and learning?”

By the way, Ethan told me the topics he was planning on covering in his own 20-minute BIF story. Fabulous. I hope he blogs that as well.